Stelarc

“Bodies are both Zombies and Cyborgs. We have never had a mind of own
and we often perform involuntarily- conditioned and extremely prompted.
Ever since we evolved as hominids and developed bipedal locomotion, two
limbs became manipulators and we constructed artifacts, instruments and
machines. In other words we have always been coupled with technology.
We have always been prothetic bodies. We fear the involuntary and we are
becoming increasingly automated and extended. But we fear what we have
always been and what we have already become- Zombies and Cyborgs.”

Stelarc is a performance artist who is interested in alternate, intimate and involuntary aesthetic experiences. For this, he has used medical, robot and virtual reality systems to explore, extend and enhance the body's performance parameters. Stelarc started by acoustically and visually probing the body, amplifying his brainwaves, heartbeat, bloodflow and muscle signals and filming the inside of his lungs, stomach and colon.

Having experimented with the limitations of the body, he developed strategies to augment its capabilities, interfacing the body with prosthetics, robotics, medical imagining or computer technologies - such as the internet or virtual reality. Stelarc has performed extensively in art events all over the world, including new music, dance festivals and experimental theater.

Stelarc is Chair in Performance Art, School of Arts, Brunel University West London, UK and Senior Research Fellow and Visiting Artist in the MARCS Labs at the University of Western Sydney, Australia.

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A presentation by Australian artist Stelarc.
"Bodies are hacked, genes are mapped, prosthetics are attached and chimeras are engineered in labs. The trans-species, the trans-gendered and even the trans-human proliferate." Stelarc

Seminar with Stelarc and Henk Oosterling at the Erasmus University. "In a time of Circulating Flesh, Fractal Flesh and Phantom Flesh organs are extracted and exchanged, bodies and bits of bodies remotely generate recurring patterns of interactivity ...